


and gather as the evening falls

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, innkeeper ashe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25835911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Years later, Ashe will stand beside Dedue at the door of an old boardinghouse in Fhirdiad’s lower quarter, with a deed of sale in one hand and a book in the other, filled cover to cover with recipes transcribed in a blunt and careful hand.By then, they’ll be older, wind-battered but unbowed, and for all that this looks and feels like an ending each of them will recognize the road that begins at the doorstep of the old house, stretching out steady and promising under their feet.The house Ashe keeps after the war, with a little help from his friends.
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert & Dedue Molinaro, Blue Lions Students & Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert
Comments: 20
Kudos: 58





	and gather as the evening falls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [themorninglark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/gifts).



> For Lark, who asked me for a story set in the inn from Ashe and Dedue's paired ending; here's the story _of_ Ashe's inn, sort of, but typically of us it's the story of some other things, too. It was an honor to bring this to life for you.
> 
> Title from ["The Parting Glass."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twoe6SUdlGQ)

“They aren’t ripe,” Ashe had said to Dedue in the greenhouse, on the last Sunday of the Great Tree Moon.

That morning, they’d been working together at the back, weeding in silence on opposite ends of the long planter’s box. Ashe had seen a movement out of the corner of his eye, the shadow of a bent arm and the glint of sunlight off a pair of pruning shears, and in the stillness of the new day it hadn’t been as hard as he thought to find something resembling courage to speak with.

Dedue had turned to face Ashe, the shears in one hand and a bunch of long brown Boa fruit pods in the other, saying nothing. This in itself was not surprising; Ashe had learned the way of Dedue’s silences quickly, had been told multiple times by people who thought they had authority to speak on the matter that it was not in his best interest to try and breach them. But Ashe had not missed how the same people tended to look at _him,_ either, in a way that seemed not at all dissimilar from the bent heads and the sideways glances that tended to follow Dedue wherever he went—and that alone was more than enough reason not to take the advice.

So Ashe had looked back. After a long minute, he’d seen something in Dedue’s face loosen gradually, as though relenting. “The unripe fruit of the Boa tree when boiled and mashed into a paste can be used to flavor soups or stews.”

“Oh, really?” asked Ashe, curiosity sparking. “I never knew that. How does it taste?”

“Sour,” said Dedue, and at Ashe’s raised eyebrows added, “Faerghus winters are gloomy, as you know. Strong flavors rouse the senses.”

Now it’s not quite lunchtime, and they’re in the back of the kitchen instead, standing together underneath the hanging strings of garlic and herbs. Ashe has been watching Dedue boil and mash the fruit, and stir it into a paste in a bowl with a little hot water and salt. From the fireplace, he can smell a pot of pork broth, simmering gently. Out the window across the room, the gardener’s begun to whistle as he prunes the rosebushes.

Closer than the rosebushes, closer than the pot of pork broth, are Dedue and his silences, and the clay bowl he’s cradling in the curve of one palm. His head is angled down toward it, careful and attentive, like he’s listening for something—but a beat later he glances up and holds it out to Ashe.

“Here,” he says. “Taste this.”

The paste inside the bowl is green, and of a fluid, cloudy consistency. Ashe reaches out with a finger, reconsiders, takes a spoon from the counter instead. The flavor that lands on his tongue is tart and bracing; it leaves a faint tingling sensation behind—and a distinct sense, as promised, of being more awake than before.

“That’s amazing, Dedue!” he exclaims, with feeling he doesn’t have to feign. “I’ve never tasted anything like it. How did you ever learn to use Boa fruit this way?”

Ashe sees it as Dedue takes the bowl back and lowers it down onto the counter—the lowered eyes, the flicker of hesitation.

“It was common practice… where I come from. As a child, I was taught how to thin the young fruit before the trees dropped them all.” He seems to weigh something up in his mind, briefly, before continuing, “We would take a few from each tree, until we had about a basketful. The rest we left to ripen on the branch.”

It does not escape Ashe’s notice that Dedue does not say who taught him, does not say who “we” were, speaks of his childhood the way someone else might speak of ancient history. There are questions about Duscur gathered in the back of his throat, tingling. He takes a breath, and swallows them down. _Not yet._

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” he says instead, and it’s no lie. “That with a little imagination even unripe fruit is good for something.”

Something in Dedue’s face softens, near-imperceptibly. The change is so slight someone watching less closely would likely miss it—but it does not escape Ashe, either. He’s still training his archer’s eye, but in the meantime it is keen enough to attend to other, gentler things.

“I have always thought so, too.”

*

Days, moons later, Ashe will find himself chasing that taste. It will be years, many years, before he gets it right with his own hands.

Years later, Ashe will stand beside Dedue at the door of an old boardinghouse in Fhirdiad’s lower quarter, with a deed of sale in one hand and a book in the other, filled cover to cover with recipes transcribed in a blunt and careful hand.

On that day, Ashe will have just refused a knighthood from the king. Between them it will be Dedue only who wears the cape of Blaiddyd blue—Dedue in the silver armor polished to a gleam in the watery winter sun, smiling and stiffening up only slightly as Ashe turns and all but flings himself forward to embrace him.

By then, they’ll be older, wind-battered but unbowed, and for all that this looks and feels like an ending each of them will recognize the road that begins at the doorstep of the old house, stretching out steady and promising under their feet.

*

It’s spring again, and Ashe’s inn is a kitchen in the process of becoming all the other things. He’s been working at that becoming with Mercedes all day, fitting new sheets to the beds upstairs and new curtains to the windows; now dusk is falling, and they’ve got a pot of soup on the fire that will reward them for their efforts when it’s finished.

Mercedes hums as she works. She’s been going back and forth over an old song all day, and she’s at it again now, stirring the pot as Ashe rummages through the cupboards under the counter for the good bowls.

“What rhymes with ‘flowers,’ Ashe?” she asks him, whereupon he hits his head against the cabinet ceiling.

“Towers, maybe?” he says, reaching to rub the bump already beginning to rise at the back of his skull, but pondering the matter very seriously all the same, for Mercedes. “Hours? Powers? Sh—”

“Showers, that’s the one!” Mercedes exclaims, and starts humming again. “‘Great Tree showers, Harpstring flowers…’ Do you think you’ll be ready to open by the time the flowers bloom?”

Ashe finds the bowls eventually, stacked one on top of the other near the back, but stalls around the question. There’s so much that needs work still; he hasn’t stopped finding things to fix since he bought this place last year, polishing and painting, hammering and heaving the old house into something resembling a place one might like to lay their head down in for a while. The garden out back still wants weeding, and there’s no doubt the front door could use a new coat of paint.

That’s all right. The flowers have always been slow to bloom in Faerghus, but on the day they finally open you often forget all about the wait.

“That’s the hope.” He straightens up, bowls cradled in the crook of one arm. “What do you think of the broth?”

It used to be that most anything she tasted in the kitchen made Mercedes smile, but in the years since they met on breakfast duty that first uncertain spring Ashe has learned the look of her true delight. It’s in the eyes, in the way they crinkle at the edges until they nearly close. The sort of smile you don’t realize you’re already returning until you are. That’s Mercedes’ real smile.

“Sour?” Ashe asks, when she lowers the ladle and pinches her lips together.

“Yes, very,” agrees Mercedes. “But in a good way. In the sort of way that makes you feel awake.”

“That was the hope, too. When Annette comes with the vegetables, it’s going to be perfect.”

Annette had not said what she’d be bringing, but Ashe doesn’t imagine they’ll be spoilt for choice. Some root crops, perhaps. Probably not any greens, which grow reluctantly in Faerghus soil at the best of times. But there’s no need to worry overmuch; at the end of the day, anything you bring can go into the pot. That’s the magic of Boa stew—and far be it from Ashe, really, to nitpick the gifts of a generous heart.

They hear the church bells first, tolling the hour—then, in the gap between each chime, the shoes clacking on the stone path that leads through the garden, then the voice.

“What time is it, what time is it… Oh, fiddlesticks, is it that late already! Oh, Annie, you’ve really done it now…”

There’s a clatter then—the rake leaning against the wall falling to the ground, no doubt—and another that must be Annette tripping over a bucket. It must be by some mundane miracle that she still gets the back door to the kitchen open before Ashe can reach it, windblown and red in the face, her arms full of white radishes.

“I know,” says Annette, before either of them can greet her. “I know I told you midday, but I got caught up in drafting my lesson plans for the Advanced Pyromancy lecture I’m going to be taking over next month, and before I knew it the sun was going down and…” She pauses, checks herself, and at last proffers the biggest radish, holding it out by the stem like a hunting trophy. “But look, I brought you presents like I promised! My students’ best yield! Aren’t they something?”

“I’ll say.” Ashe grins, accepting his gift. It’s near as long as his arm, and heavy too. “This one alone looks like it’d make a fine lance. I don’t know how I’m going to fit all of it into the soup.”

Annette’s eyes are round as saucers as she comes into the kitchen and sets the rest of her load down on the counter. “You’re going to put… all of it in the soup?”

“Maybe a quarter of it in the soup,” he says, decidedly. “The rest I’m thinking of pickling in spices and brine. I could send it up to the castle, as a treat for Dedue and Dimitri.”

“Dedue would love that, I’m sure, but would His Majesty?”

“You’ll have to make them really spicy,” says Mercedes from the fireplace, still stirring the pot. The flames underneath have risen since Annette’s arrival, dancing and crackling merrily. “Fit to set his royal tongue aflame.”

“Mercie! That’s so terrible!”

“And so what if it is? He’d find it funny in the end, the same as you.”

The stew they make tonight will be more than enough for each of them to have seconds, Ashe thinks, as he takes Annette’s radish back out to the well for a wash. Possibly even thirds. Later, they will pull a few chairs out of the dining room and into the kitchen and eat around the fire with their bowls in their laps and the pot still hanging between them—and they won’t have much but themselves, but it should be enough.

*

“That Dimitri,” says Felix, when he visits on the ides of the Blue Sea Moon. From the open window behind him, Ashe can see the lanterns glowing golden in the temperate night, can hear a lute going around the corner—but Felix’s face remains cast in severe, familiar shadow. “He’ll work himself into the ground overseeing these silly celebrations. Dedue as well. I swear to you that man’s right hand has just frozen permanently around his quill by now.”

“Like yours around your sword hilt, you mean, Duke Fraldarius? At least Dedue can sign his letters without hacking the desk in two.” Across the table, Sylvain lifts Ashe’s largest jug of mulled wine to top up his own cup, then Felix’s. “You see much of him or His Majesty around this castle of yours?”

“I can’t say I do,” Ashe admits, hands folded decorously behind his back where he stands at Felix’s shoulder. Truth be told, he hasn’t seen Dimitri since his coronation day, and Dedue not much more recently—not since the turn of the new year. “They’re as busy as you say.”

“Figures. And it’s not a cakewalk for you either, running this place, I bet,” says Sylvain. His eyebrows arch, something like mischief finding its way onto his typically relaxed face. “Lucky you’ve got old friends who can skip out on their work long enough to convince other old friends to do the same. What say you to a good old-fashioned class reunion, eh, Ashe? A party wild enough to make the Goddess cry?”

“As long as the rest of you pay your tab at the end of the night, I wouldn’t mind.” Already he likes the idea more than he has the courage to admit, presumptuous as it feels to hang his hopes on it. Annette would want to help him in the kitchen, he knows. Dedue as well, like in the old days. “I do miss everyone.”

“Speak for yourselves,” mutters Felix. “It’s tiresome enough getting letters from the boar. Being at table with him again would put me right to sleep.” He reaches down under the table and produces a large box of polished mahogany, held shut with a brass clasp. Without ceremony, he passes it to Ashe. “For you.” 

It only stands to reason that Felix the young duke of Fraldarius too is busy. Very busy. So busy he shouldn’t be able to come up to Fhirdiad to scold an old friend and bring another old friend a fine gift—but here he is, and the box in Ashe’s hand had nearly caused his wrists to buckle from the sudden weight. Inside are four carving knives; the blades are black steel, and the handles ivory, and the lantern-light gleams off their edges in such a way as to suggest they were not made long ago at all.

The black steel of Fraldarius is one of its most prized exports. Ashe had read about it in a book, long ago at the Academy. It’s a land that makes blades, in more ways than one; Felix is the son of that land that Ashe knows best, and everything about him has been honed to cut to the quick like a blade, and yet—

Ashe shuts the lid and wraps his arms around the box, smiling. The wood is warm—but that might just be his imagination. “These are beautiful knives, Felix. Already sharpened, and everything. Thank you.”

“They’re nothing special,” Felix tells him with a scowl. “My blacksmith’s spares. Use them however you like—or don’t, it doesn’t matter.”

“That pig we brought should give you some good practice.” Sylvain laughs, so loud it tips his head back and echoes all the way up to the rafters. “It sure led us on a merry dance, let me tell you, all over the plains. Good thing the old javelin arm’s still got it, after all this time.”

Ashe considers this for a moment, quiet. It has not been nearly long enough for Sylvain’s arm to have begun forgetting its strength, not long at all since it took more deaths than this, spitted one by one on the end of his lance. Ashe knows this, and knows Sylvain must, too, from the way he laughs. Trying to widen the distance between the days, looking for ways to say _we’re done with all that now_.

The pig has been on the spit all evening, roasting slowly over an open fire. They told him he might carve it up and share it with the rest of the house, for the occasion, and Ashe knows it’s not so much a generosity as it is its own kind of selfish wish. That a spear might be an instrument of celebration, if it’s cast under the Goddess’ rising star.

“Don’t dawdle here on our account,” says Felix. When he lifts his cup to drink, it’s not a toast, and demands no ceremony. “You’re needed in the kitchen, are you not?”

Ashe, hefting the knives under one arm, tightens his apron strings, and goes.

*

One thing Dedue tells Ashe, during the war: nothing is ever wasted.

They are kneeling together in the yard in front of the stables, and Ashe has just slaughtered a pig for dinner. It’s ugly work—and there is so much work to do besides that, both ugly and not, with the monastery in such ruins. It’s no surprise that it’s fallen to the two of them. They’ve never minded the ugly work, so Dedue stuns and holds the pig, and Ashe sets the knife to its throat.

Ashe had cried the first time he ever had to butcher an animal. He remembers it well—one of Lord Lonato’s prized hens, intended for a roast on the occasion of Christophe’s eighteenth birthday. Ashe, sent to the coop on account of Cook being too busy with the vegetables, had taken the hen by the neck as he’d been instructed to do. The bone had snapped so quickly in his hands.

It was the ease of it that had made him cry; he knows Dedue won’t mock him when he tells him this was his first taste of grief.

Later, in the kitchen, Dedue tells Ashe that pigs are valued because no part of them goes to waste after the slaughter. He is carving up the meat now as if to illustrate this, setting aside the choice cuts, the tender flesh of the rib and loin. The shank and shoulder, which are tougher, will soften with stewing. But even the parts nobody wants—the cheeks and the ears can be chopped up and fried, the feet boiled for jelly and the tailbone for soup stock. You can make a meal from all of it, with a little imagination. Something to be grateful for, in lean times.

*

The fall harvest begins, and the west wind brings Ingrid home from patrolling the villages to the south. She comes to the inn on her first night back in the city with a bundle of water spinach for Ashe, and a note from Dedue that reads: _Separate stalks and leaves. Stir-fry with garlic and black vinegar._

With no urgent need to cut it, Ingrid’s hair has begun growing out again. She keeps it tied back with a green ribbon, and her face is ruddy from riding out all day in the sun and wind, and she smiles now when she says that she has learned so much these past few months, about things that grow. And while Ashe thinks part of him must always be quietly missing Dedue deep down, he thinks he might feel it announcing itself a bit more insistently for a moment, brave and bright, an ember in the pit of his chest.

He does, indeed, stir-fry the water spinach. When he serves it to Ingrid over a bowl of hulled barley, she tucks right in with a gusto that still surprises him.

“You always were the only one who could ever get me to eat greens,” she tells him, once she’s finished cleaning her bowl. Every last grain gone. If Ashe looked into it now, he’d see his reflection on the bottom. “If anything, you’ve gotten even better. I can see now why you gave up a knighthood for this place.”

Ingrid is so frank it makes him want to laugh. She had had a lot to say about it in the beginning, too, when he chose this old crumbling place over—over what must have felt like everything, back then. The spear and the mantle and the permanent place at their king’s side. She still looks like she has a lot to say now, gazing even and clear-eyed at Ashe across the table. Not unkindly, never unkindly, simply wanting to know the answer.

“Was it so difficult to believe?” he asks.

“Not difficult,” says Ingrid. “Just a surprise. We used to talk so much about… It was your dream, wasn’t it?”

She’s right about that. The knighthood had been his dream—is still in his dreams, some nights. His body remembers how to sit a horse over long distances, remembers the heft of a lance. Sometimes his eye still strays of its own accord toward the parapets of the castle, enthroned on a hill above the rest of the city.

“Well, what about you?” he asks her. “Did being a knight turn out to be all you dreamed it would be?”

Ingrid frowns then, down across the brow—it’s thoughtfulness, Ashe knows, and not displeasure, her attention turning itself toward a thing that deserves it in full. At last, she says, “It’s not. The real thing is much more tedious. Much more riding out on uneventful patrols, much more standing in front of doors, but…” There’s a pause. Then something softening, gently, almost imperceptibly. “But there are wonderful things about it too. I love training the new recruits, and seeing the pegasi foal.”

Ashe finds he can imagine this well.

“I wonder if the real thing is always like that, whatever the dream. Much more tedious, and more wonderful.”

He reaches out for the water jug between them, and refills her cup. She raises it as if to toast him, smiling.

“Tell me about your customers,” Ingrid says.

*

There’s a rumor in the city that, since autumn’s turn, the king of the United Kingdom of Fódlan has begun to frequent an inn in the lower quarter some nights, past midnight, to sample the innkeeper’s most daring experiments. The innkeeper will neither confirm nor deny, but Ashe tells it to Dimitri after the lights go out upstairs. The dining room is empty, and they can light a candle and take a table all to themselves by the open kitchen door.

“I wonder,” Dimitri muses aloud, “if such a rumor brings you more custom, or less.”

“It’s not the first rumor about this place, and it won’t be the last,” says Ashe, with a small shrug. “I’ve always had about as much custom as I can manage, so it’s all the same to me.”

And it’s true. Business at the inn had been slow at first, but it’s decent now. Ashe has a small staff to hand—there’s young Moira to help with the table service, and her sister Maeve to help with the cleaning. Both smart girls who could use the work, fresh out of the orphanage as they are, and for all he knows Moira might have the run of the kitchen soon. She’s been studying the cookbook Dedue wrote for Ashe, even takes it up to her room with her some nights with his permission. Ashe knows what it’s like to be let out into the world with nothing, but also how good it feels to build something of your own, slowly, in your own good time.

“You run a tight ship indeed, it would seem.” Dimitri rests his chin in his hand and looks Ashe in the eye. “I’m glad of it, and proud of you.”

Ashe has heard that gaze called many things over the years. Terrible, and terrifying—like a tempest, like a forest fire. He meets it over the candle, steadily. “If I can serve you, Dimitri, I certainly consider it the highest honor.”

The very first thing Ashe ever served Dimitri at his inn had been a cup of Boa fruit broth, seasoned so sour it made his eyes water, and he had scrunched his face all the way up like a pickled plum from the combined pleasure and pain. Since then Dimitri has made a habit of coming for a second dinner—not often, and always late, but frequently enough to become a habit all the same, because Ashe only ever feeds him what he’d happily feed anybody else.

Earlier today Ashe managed to get his hands on a catch of fresh fish—salmon and pike and the largest marlin he’s ever seen, all gleaming and silvery on the ice in the market. This last one he’s cut up into cubes and served to Dimitri cold and raw, steeped in white wine vinegar and lemon juice and a powder of ground yellow peppers from Duscur.

“Dedue says it’s the smallest peppers that have the sharpest bite,” says Ashe. He thinks it wouldn’t be an exaggeration by any means to call them the fieriest peppers he’s ever handled, for all the biggest one had been no more than half as long as his little finger. Hours later, his hands are still stinging. “What do you think?”

Dimitri spears a large piece on the end of his fork, looks at it a moment, and bites. Chews. Says nothing for a moment, with a pensive expression.

“It’s good,” he says after the first swallow, and pauses. “It’s very…”

Ashe waits. “Yes?”

“Hot,” Dimitri finishes, reaching for water, and Ashe laughs. He drinks deep, and when he lowers his cup, his eyes are bright.

“I like to see you laugh, Ashe,” he says. “I like that you’re no longer afraid of me.”

There have been people afraid of Dimitri for as long as Ashe has known him, though with time and circumstance that fear has changed its form many times over. Ashe remembers well enough that he had felt something like it, too, a long time ago. Something that made his hands shake and his throat dry and his tongue clumsy, that always left him shaken, unable to speak. That feeling is not so far from him, still, in this new life of theirs, but he sees it for what it is now.

How lonely Dimitri must have been, all those long years atop his pedestal. How lonely he must still be, now and then, and how heavy the crown—but not under this roof, if Ashe has anything to say about it.

“I was never afraid of you, Dimitri,” he says, because it’s just the truth. “Fear is not the word for what it was.”

*

One thing Ashe does not need to tell Dedue, when winter’s beginning finally brings him to the inn’s back entrance: all things, indeed, in their own good time.

Over the last year, Dedue’s cut his hair. The scars on his face that their war gave him are fading. But the cloak he likes to wear is still the same, still blue as a night full of stars. The way he writes his words, every letter solid, forthright and true—that too is still the same. All he’s learned and remembered and discovered in their time apart will fill the last empty pages of the book he gave Ashe, easily.

Ashe embraces him at the door, and doesn’t let go until he feels Dedue’s arms lift around him, squeezing tightly once—just once—and then releasing.

“What is that smell?”

He must already be able to tell, of course, what’s bubbling in the pot over the fire. Ashe smiles, and moves to lead him by the arm into the house.

“It’s not anything yet,” he says, because it isn’t, yet. “But it might become dinner, if you help me.”

And he will—Ashe knows he will.

**Author's Note:**

> Readers from my part of the world may recognize in this fic lot of oblique homages to Filipino food, particularly [kilawin](https://www.pepper.ph/step-step-guide-making-kilawin/), [adobong kangkong,](https://www.kawalingpinoy.com/adobong-kangkong/) [lechón](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lechon), and [sinigang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinigang), the most beautiful soup in the universe.
> 
> Come say hi to me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/strikingIight)!


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